Saturday 24th October: My Media Roundup by Brian Morrissey, The Rebooting

October 24, 2020

Every Saturday morning, we invite a publishing pro to put together their top media links. This week’s guest editor is Brian Morrissey.

Brian writes The Rebooting, a weekly newsletter focused on the path to sustainable media businesses. For a decade, he was the president and editor-in-chief of Digiday Media. He’s covered the digital media industry for 20 years.

Subscribe to The Rebooting (it’s free) and follow him on Twitter. 

Brian says:

"The throes of an American presidential election are always a nerve-wracking time, never more so than this time around. News publishers haven’t been perfect this cycle, but it’s a vast improvement to 2016, when too many were pawns of misinformation campaigns. Look no further than The Wall Street Journal, where the news side wrote a reported piece knocking down dubious claims being peddled by the opinion side about Joe Biden’s son’s business activities in Ukraine.

But now, the news business faces a scary scenario: Life without Trump. For all the lies he’s spews, Trump is right about this: He’s been good for the news business. The Trump Bump could easily become a Trump Slump as Biden Makes Politics Boring Again. Coming on top of Covid, and a roiling culture war inside newsrooms, expect a rough 2021."

On the face of it, The Atlantic has everything going for it. Back in 2019, it got a rich backer when Laurene Powell Jobs, with a net worth of $19 billion, struck a deal to take a controlling stake in the company. It embarked on a splashy hiring spree. But like families, every media company is dysfunctional in its own way. At Digiday, Steven Perlberg digs into management dysfunction and missteps, along with the successes in subscriptions that will determine The Atlantic’s future. Of interest to me: The Atlantic’s big subs number (650,000 total) still doesn’t make up for the losses in other deteriorating businesses like ads.

It’s been a couple decades since the U.S. had a big antitrust case against a large and popular tech company. In that case, the feds were after Microsoft for bundling its browser into the then-dominant Windows operating system. That the government was so concerned about Microsoft’s stranglehold in personal computing as opposed to Apple shows the shortcomings of the slow-moving apparus of trust-busting when it’s applied to tech. The new Department of Justice case against Google is no slam dunk. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology delivers into the prospects the case will change much. His conclusion: Don’t hold your breath. Google: “is likely to breeze through the DOJ’s case, setting more bad precedent,” Kantrowitz writes. My take: This is going to be more of a benefit to European regulators; the U.S. doesn’t have much stomach for reining in private enterprise, particularly one of the most iconic modern American companies -- not that politics would ever sully such a purely economic apparatus.

Hunter Walk is a vocal venture capitalist who manages not to be boring or annoying. He has a perceptive piece that examines (one path to) “the future of media.” In Walk’s formula, sustainable media boils down to “come for the content, stay for the community.” This is a theme I explored this week around the concept of “DTC media,” these are brands that serve real communities, whether that’s hunters or professionals. The key: Being more than just information to be able to connect like-minded people. These businesses have bright futures, particularly as more tech tools become available to both solo creators and “micro media” collections. Watch this space.

The “Slate take” is a modern American journalism convention for a reflexively contrarian piece when most everyone has coalesced around a viewpoint. The unmitigated disaster that was Quibi, backed by nearly $2 billion and run by Hollywood big shot Jeffrey Katzenberg, presented a perfect opportunity. Recode’s Peter Kafka shot his shot, as the kids Quibi failed to attract often say. Peter’s take: Stop shitting on Quibi so much, it was at least an audacious bet on high-quality content vs impersonal (and biased) algorithms. All true. Covid aside, Quibi melted down not because of a lack of tech or marketing acumen, but on the merits: Quibi’s content wasn’t compelling enough to generate heat in the culture. For all the talk of new models, without the must-have content services like Quibi will always be doomed.

OK, one Trump piece. At Politico, founding editor John Harris has seen several presidential cycles. He has a perceptive piece about why this time around reporters might be biased in giving Trump too much of a chance. There is undeniable revulsion throughout the American press corps for Trump, not least because he has spent a good part of four years vilifying a free press and trying to cower them into submission. But what Harris sees is subtler and perhaps more lethal: Fear of looking like a jackass again. The press in general is in “anything could happen” hedge mode when all the data shows the chances of Joe Biden becoming the next U.S. president are extremely high. Sure, Trump could again pull a rabbit out of his toupee, but any objective appraisal of his chances 10 days out would say they are very dire.

If you would like to guest edit a future edition of My Media Roundup, simply reply to this email.